Profile Oliver Sacks: seeing things

摘要

"I'm told my voice is not too Americanised", says Oliver Sacks. I tell him that it isn't (although I'm a little surprised to find that, in conversation over the telephone, he sounds more like a genteel Oxbridge don than the livewire medic portrayed by Robin Williams in the 1990 film Awakenings, which was adapted from one of Sacks' early books). Sacks, now in his 79th year, grew up in north London but moved to the USA in the 1960s, wanting "change and room". "I actually initially thought of Canada", he tells me, "then I took a bus ride to California, and that changed my mind." The flora and fauna of the west coast were, he says, the deciding factor: "I did think of returning to England for about 10 years-I thought that I was only on an extended visit-but now I think the visit may extend to the end of my life."